In 2002, England limped out of the global football showcase. This was doubly annoying, as they had gone a goal up against Brazil. Ronaldinho, who upto this point was considered the unfinished article, took a quick free kick and beat English goalkeeper, David Seamen in this embarassing fashion.
This is a quite typical way for England to exit a competition.
There has to be some kind of laughably poor piece of defending/goalkeeping or an evil deflection (Germany 1990). Basically, some kind of external excuse for a goal going in.
Luck is never on the English side. Sol Campbell has twice scored real goals which have then been chalked off (Argentina 1998, Portugal 2004).
There will also then need to be a harsh refereeing decision. This could be a booking which means a player can't play in the next match (Gazza, Germany 1990), or a by the book sending off (Beckham, Argentina 1998).
Cruel misses then come into play, like Gazza stretching and failing to net against Germany in Euro 96. Darren Anderton hit the post. Either of those would have won the semi-final there and then.
And then of course, there are penalties. The careers of Paul Ince, Gareth Southgate, Chris Waddle, David Batty and Darius Vassel have been tinged with naffness of penalty misses.
Phil Neville suffered a similar fate by conceding a penalty for Romania to convert and knock (the worst) England (team in recent history) out of Euro 2000. As a result he became the temporarily less despised Neville for a month.
David 'Calamity' James also conceded a spot-kick against France just 2 years ago, and converted a creditable draw into an opening loss.
When the chips are down, England have a habit of bottling it, scuffing it, losing their heads or being outclassed. But with football being football, each loss of sanity or skill is only a 'hair's breadth' away from being the key moment of genius which lets us put Gazza up with Maradona, Linekar up with Voeller, Shilton up with Zoff.
England have won just the one penalty shoot out, to the equally bad in tournaments, Spain. Stuart Pearce belted in his redemptive kick and unified a nation into thinking we could go on and win the tournament.
About a week later, it was all over for another couple of years, and there was even renewed hope that we could take the experience and move forward.
The worry here is that with each passing of four years, the world class players have grown richer, slower, and fatter, and winning the World Cup is of less relevance than looking good in the global ad showcase the few weeks before.
posted by Andy Lepki @ 3:36 PM
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